Intel Broadwell Support Continues To Land For Linux

Written by Michael Larabel in Intel on 21 December 2013 at 11:18 AM EST. Add A Comment
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Intel Broadwell support continues to be tidied up within the Intel Mesa DRI and DRM kernel drivers to hopefully make for a smooth launch of Intel's next-generation processors within a few months time.

Intel landed initial Broadwell support for the Linux 3.13 kernel and with the Linux 3.14 kernel the graphics on this next-generation hardware to succeed Haswell will be further refined. There's also been initial support in Mesa Git for a while, the Broadwell X.Org driver support recently landed, and on the CPU side there's a new GCC compiler patch. We've also seen kernel patches emerge for Intel PT support and Intel crypto optimizations among other tuning by Intel engineers.

Hitting mainline Mesa Git yesterday was continued work on the open-source Intel Mesa driver. You can see some of the Broadwell activity inside Mesa via the BRW Git commits.

Overall it's nice to see Intel developers still pushing public changes and seeing that their open-source Linux driver code will be in a good, usable state for the hardware when it launches. This still is something not generally found with major AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics card launches on their open-source drivers -- generally the code is published slightly ahead of or right after the product launches in initial form and users are then left waiting until the next round of Mesa and kernel release cycles, etc. At least AMD and NVIDIA are quick with their binary driver updates.

In case you missed it, this week I published the Intel Linux 2013 Haswell driver Year-in-Review and NVIDIA 2013 Linux graphics driver Year-in-Review. Coming next week will be the AMD Catalyst Year-in-Review along with an Ivy Bridge 2013 performance recap and other interesting and exclusive articles.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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